Page 64 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 64 of 237

Clover Todd, the daughter of a Columbia University professor. (They had a son, Allen Macy, and two daughters,
Clover Todd and Joan.)

In 1926, after service in Berlin, Constantinople and Washington, Allen Dulles left the world of diplomacy to
begin a fifteen-year period of law practice with his brother in the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. As
an international lawyer, he knew the political and industrial elite of Europe, and of Germany. This became useful
during World War II when General Donovan assigned Dulles as chief of the OSS mission in Switzerland. He had
diplomatic cover as an assistant to the minister in the American Legation. But he operated as a master spy from a
fifteenth-century house in Berne overlooking the Aar River.

He has been credited with two outstanding feats for the OSS -- first, penetrating the German Abwehr, Hitler's
intelligence service, and second, negotiating the surrender of German troops in Italy.

After the war it was natural enough that Allen Dulles would soon gravitate away from his law practice into the
more exciting world of espionage. While it is impossible to make any definite judgment about the talents of a man
who operated, for the most part, out of view, the constant and bitter personal attacks upon him by the Communist
bloc provide one significant indication of his effectiveness. He certainly bothered them.

The CIA director projected a deceptively grandfatherly image, with his white hair, rimless glasses, his pipe and
his sense of humor. There was no official in Washington more charming. Beneath this outward Mr. Chips
demeanor was a man fascinated by the world of intelligence, by secret operations and by espionage and of its
ramifications. Although he seemed to fumble a good deal with his pipe and his tobacco, Mr. Dulles perhaps
quietly enjoyed the incongruousness of his appearance and his vocation. He was not without a sense of the
dramatic.

Dulles was occasionally accused of being too much of a public figure for the head of a secret service. And in 1955
a Hoover Commission task force criticized him for having "taken upon himself too many burdensome duties and
responsibilities on the operational side of CIA activities."

"Allen," commented one CIA associate, "couldn't administer himself."

But if the CIA was run in a tweedy, relaxed, pipe-and-slipper manner under Dulles, it was also true that morale
was high, and he was well liked within the agency as well as outside of it.

Except for his closest friends, few people knew of the great personal tragedy in Dulles' life. His son, wounded in
Korea, suffered brain damage that left him with very little recognition of people or events, and it was finally
necessary to place him in an institution in Germany on Lake Constance, just over the Swiss border.

For most of the nine years that Dulles headed the intelligence community, he worked with the same three
assistants at the CIA:

Charles Pearre Cabell, a gray-haired but youthful-looking four-star Air Force general and West Point graduate,
was his deputy director. A Texan from Dallas (where his brother Earle was the mayor), he was the former head of
Air Force Intelligence. He came to the CIA in 1953.

Richard Bissell, the deputy director for plans, who joined the CIA in 1954.